1. Statement of the Technical Field
The inventive arrangements relate to computer systems and more particularly to computer infrastructure for load balancing and sharing data and media as between mobile/web applications and corporate contact center.
2. Description of the Related Art
Interactive voice response (IVR) systems are commonly used to facilitate a human interaction with an enterprise computer system by way of a telephone or mobile communication device. In such systems, customers interact with the host computer system using a telephone keypad or by speech recognition. These systems allow users to service their own interface needs without a human operator by following an IVR dialogue. The IVR dialogue is usually a pre-recorded or computer generated audio dialogue that is defined by an IVR tree. Conventional IVR systems as described herein allow users to interface with the host computer system by means of a series of simple interactions. These interactions usually involve the use of DTMF tones and/or voice recognition algorithms to determine user selections. Visual interactive voice response (visual IVR) systems are conceptually similar to conventional IVR systems, but are enhanced insofar as they also allow users to interact with the host computer through a series of visual menus. Visual IVR systems take the process to a higher level by allowing the user to make service selections through a menu displayed on a smart-phone or other type of mobile device with display capability. Because of their importance to the overall success of an enterprise, companies make substantial investments in their IVR systems to ensure that they provide for a pleasant user experience and cost-effective processing of user service needs.
In a conventional IVR system, the customer or user places a call to a particular entity. When the call is received, the IVR system executes a series of automated scripts and then responds to simple user commands to satisfy the customer's service requirements. A visual IVR system works in a similar manner with the web application connecting into the IVR system to execute the relevant scripts. In many instances of either the IVR or VIVR interaction, the customer may determine that they need to speak with a human call center agent. Accordingly, the IVR system will receive certain user inputs in response to the IVR script and then establish the necessary call to a human agent in a contact center. Once a connection is made to the human agent in the contact center, use of the IVR system generally terminates with respect to that particular customer, who then continues dealing only with the human operator.